The Life and Times of Richard III (5 page)

Edward and Richard were now the guests of Charles the Rash – ruler of Burgundy since Duke Philip’s death in 1467 – and his Duchess, their sister Margaret. Charles was at first reluctant to become embroiled in the dynastic politics of his wife’s family, but underwent a rapid conversion when King Louis declared war on him at Christmas. He realised that his duchy would not long survive an alliance between the French King and England’s new master, the Earl of Warwick. On 11 March 1471 the Yorkists sailed from Flushing with a mixed army of Burgundians and Englishmen in a fleet of fourteen ships provided by the German merchants of the Hanse towns. Rebuffed in Norfolk and scattered by a storm off the Yorkshire coast, Edward’s fleet at last made landfall on the Humber estuary. At this stage his meagre force of sixteen hundred men lay at the mercy of the Marquess Montagu and the Earl of Northumberland who each commanded superior forces in the vicinity. But both held back, content for the moment to let others decide the issue. Edward marched south unmolested, gathering recruits to his standard at Nottingham and Leicester. By 29 March he was outside Coventry, offering battle to his arch-enemy the Earl of Warwick. The Kingmaker refused to leave the shelter of the city walls until he could be reinforced by the three converging armies of Montagu, Oxford and Clarence. It seemed as if his brash Yorkist cousin would soon be overwhelmed by superior numbers or sent packing back to Burgundy.

But Edward had an ace up his sleeve. During the winter of his exile ‘great and diligent labour, with all effect, was continually made by the high and mighty princess, the duchess of Burgogne, which at no season ceased to send her servants, and messengers, to the king, where he was, and to my said Lord of Clarence, into England’; through the good offices of his sister Margaret, Clarence was duly persuaded to return to the fold. On 4 April the three brothers met outside Warwick. Clarence went down on his knees and made a formal submission to the King. A more tangible asset was the force of four thousand men that Clarence brought with him to swell the Yorkist army.

With Warwick still bottled up in Coventry refusing to come out and fight, Edward decided to march on London. The defence of the capital had been entrusted to George Neville, the Archbishop of York, who also had charge of Henry VI. Robert Fabyan described his futile attempts to rally support in the solidly Yorkist city:

And for to cause the citizens to bear their more favour unto King Henry, the said King Henry was conveyed from the palace of Paul’s through Cheap and Cornhill, and so about to his said lodging again by Candlewick Street and Watling Street, being accompanied with the archbishop of York which held him all that way by the hand... the which was more liker a play than the showing of a prince to win men’s hearts, for by this mean he lost many and won none or right few, and ever he was shewed in a long blue gown of velvet as though he had no moo to change with.

On 11 April Edward and Richard entered London to rapturous applause.

Edward’s hold on London was one of the keys to his ultimate triumph over the House of Lancaster. Louis XI’s adviser, Philip de Commynes, rather frivolously suggested that he owed his support to the gratitude of the burghers’ wives whom he had selected to share his bed. But apart from his emotional appeal, Edward had always fostered the interest of the merchant community, even to the extent of undertaking a number of commercial ventures on his own account. Unlike Henry VI in his single blue velvet gown, Edward was a big spender with a lot of unsettled bills to his name.

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After a brief reunion with his wife and mother at Baynard’s Castle and a first glimpse of his six-month-old son, Edward led his army out of London on the road to Barnet. For on Easter Saturday he heard the welcome news that Warwick had just passed through St Albans. Why was he now ready to give battle when he had refused Edward’s challenge at Coventry? Queen Margaret was expected to land any day in Devon where John Courtenay, Earl of Devon and Edmund Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, were already levying troops in her name. Most probably he felt that his own position, already jeopardised by Clarence’s defection, must be retrieved by a glorious victory won without the Queen’s assistance.

Edward’s outriders galloped into Barnet village that same afternoon, putting Warwick’s scouts to flight. Half a mile beyond, they collided with the Earl’s front line drawn up across a low ridge well shielded by hedgerows. Richard, who led the Yorkist van, conferred with his brother and despite the failing light they decided to press on beyond the village and take up their positions right under Warwick’s nose. All night long Warwick’s cannon pounded into the darkness. ‘But’, recorded an eye witness, ‘thanked be God! it so fortuned that they alway overshot the King’s host, and hurted them nothing.’

At daybreak on Easter Sunday both armies were obscured from each other’s sight by a thick fog. Unbeknown to Edward the two lines of battle overlapped; his left, under Lord Hastings, was outflanked by Warwick’s right under the Earl of Oxford, while the Yorkist right, commanded by Richard, outflanked the Duke of Exeter’s men on the Lancastrian left. As soon as the fighting began, Hastings was in trouble. Under heavy pressure both from the front and on the flank his troops wavered, fell back and finally broke. With Oxford’s men at their heels, they abandoned the field and streamed back down the road towards London. By mid-morning the streets of the capital were alive with rumours that ‘the King was distressed and his field lost’. At the same time Richard was taking advantage of his corresponding overlap on the right, so weakening Exeter’s flank that Warwick had to commit the Lancastrian reserves.

Edward, commanding the Yorkist centre, was now in great danger from Oxford’s victorious troops. Returning from the rout of Hastings’s men, Oxford intended to attack the King from the rear. But by now the line of battle had swung around from an east-west to a north-south axis, and the Earl of Oxford’s men collided not with Edward’s troops, but with Montagu’s. Met by a volley of arrows from Montagu’s archers, Oxford’s men panicked and fell back. The Earl of Oxford himself fled from the field, convinced that Montagu had turned his coat again.

The ensuing confusion decided the day. By 7 am the Lancastrian front was broken, and Montagu was dead. Warwick was overtaken in flight by the King’s men and put to death on the spot. As proof of his decisive victory, Edward had the two Neville corpses exposed to public view at St Paul’s.

On that same Easter Sunday, Queen Margaret landed at Weymouth with her son, Prince Edward. Bottled up by head winds at Honfleur for three weeks, she came too late to save the House of Neville. But the Duke of Somerset was quick to point out that Edward’s army too had been badly mauled; in Wales and Lancashire, the traditional strongholds of her House, she could still bring enough men to her banners to reverse the verdict of Barnet. Speed was all important, for if Edward could hold or destroy the bridges on the River Severn before she could cross, Margaret would be cut off. On 3 May she reached the first crossing-point at Gloucester after an all-night march: but the gates were closed and Edward was by now too close behind to let her risk an assault on the town. Without pause she drove on to the next passage at Tewkesbury. Here, at four in the afternoon, she was compelled to rest. Her foot soldiers were exhausted and even the horses were flagging. Camping in a field outside the town that night, Margaret realised that she must now turn and fight.

On Saturday, 4 May 1471, it was Richard, Duke of Gloucester who led the Yorkist van on the road from Cheltenham to Tewkesbury. This time he faced the Lancastrian left, commanded by Edmund Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, the third to bear that title in a cause which had already carried off his father and his elder brother. The ground between the two armies was a patchwork of ‘foul lanes and deep dykes, and many hedges’, well reconnoitred by Somerset’s scouts but unfamiliar to Richard. Perceiving his advantage, Somerset marched his men swiftly round to Richard’s flank and launched his attack.

It was a well-judged move, but Somerset knew nothing of the company of spearmen Edward had stationed in a wood a few hundred yards to the left of Richard’s position. Those ‘200 spears’ now found themselves ideally placed at Somerset’s rear. Seizing their opportunity they ‘came and brake on, all at once upon the Duke of Somerset and his vanguard... whereof they were greatly dismayed and abashed, and so took them to flight into the park, and into the meadow that was near, and into lanes and dykes, where they best hoped to escape the danger’. Richard’s men surged forward and the pursuit became a rout. Somerset’s retreat was cut off by the River Avon and the field across which he fled earned the name of Bloody Meadow.

Richard’s success proved decisive. While Edward pressed the attack on the Lancastrian centre, Richard’s men rounded on their unprotected flank. The entire Lancastrian line crumbled and fled. Prince Edward was overtaken by a detachment of Clarence’s men and butchered. The rebel leaders who had taken sanctuary in Tewkesbury Abbey were dragged out, condemned and beheaded in the market place. A few days later Queen Margaret was taken prisoner and the last Lancastrian force in England – the Kentishmen raised by the Bastard of Fauconberg – retired from an abortive siege of London.

One last grisly act sealed the triumph of the House of York. In the words of the chronicler John Warkworth:

And the same night that King Edward came to London, King Henry, being inward in prison in the Tower of London, was put to death, the 21st day of May, on a Tuesday night, between eleven and twelve of the clock, being then at the Tower the duke of Gloucester, brother to King Edward, and many other; and on the morrow he was chested and brought to Paul’s, and his face was open that every man might see him; and in his lying he bled on the pavement there; and afterward at the Black Friars was brought, and there he bled new and fresh; and from thence he was carried to Chertsey Abbey in a boat, and buried there in our Lady Chapel.

Edward’s murder of the harmless, kindly and befogged King Henry shocked many of his contemporaries. In the words of the author of the Great Chronicle of London, Henry cared ‘little or nothing of the pomp or vanities of this world, wherefore after my mind he might say, as Christ said to Pilate, “my kingdom is not of this world” for God had endowed him with such grace that he chose the life contemplative, the which he forsook not from his tender age unto the last day of his life’. Of his many acts of kindness, none is more poignant than the concern he showed for Edward’s wife during her confinement in Westminster Abbey, when he sent her food and wine.

Yet Henry was the victim not of Edward’s cruelty, but of his own saintly indifference to worldly affairs. He lost his throne because England needed a king, not a monk – a strong king who could restore order, dispense justice and promote trade. He lost his life because the magic of his name could still inspire the respect and loyalty that men like Warwick needed to mask their cynical ambitions. With Henry as a focus for the plots, uprisings and invasions that blighted the early promise of Edward’s reign, the monarchy tumbled into disrespect and the Crown became no more than first prize in an aristocratic power game. As the chronicler John Warkworth shrewdly noted ‘When King Edward reigned, the people looked after all the aforesaid prosperities and peace, but it came not; but one battle after another, and much trouble and great loss of goods among the common people.’ Henry, the guiltless cause of so much trouble, had to die so that the king could be king.

A later generation of Tudor historians, brought up on tales of Richard’s villainy, could not resist the imputation that Richard was personally responsible for the deaths of both Henry VI and his son Edward. According to Edward Hall, who wrote in Henry VIII’s reign, Prince Edward was not slain at the battle of Tewkesbury but taken prisoner and brought before the King, ‘being a goodly feminine and well featured young gentleman’. Whereupon the King:

...demanded of him, how he durst so presumptuously enter into his Realm with banner displayed. The prince, being bold of stomach and of a good courage, answered saying: to recover my father’s kingdom and inheritage.... At which words King Edward said nothing, but with his hand thrust him from him (or, as some say, stroke him with his gauntlet), whom incontinent, they that stood about which were George, Duke of Clarence, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, Thomas, Marquess Dorset and William, Lord Hastings, suddenly murdered and piteously manquelled.

Of Henry VI’s death the same author writes: ‘Poor King Henry the Sixth, a little before deprived of his realm and imperial crown was now in the Tower of London spoiled of his life... by Richard Duke of Gloucester (as the constant fame ran) which to the intent that King Edward his brother should be clear of all secret suspicion of sudden invasion, murdered the said king with a dagger.’ In fact, there is no foundation for either of these stories. All the contemporary accounts of Tewkesbury, Lancastrian and Yorkist, simply state that Prince Edward was slain on the battlefield. Likewise, all that is known of Henry’s murder is the bald fact of his death, along with Warkworth’s statement that Richard accompanied his brothers ‘and many others’ to the Tower on the fatal night.

The Duke of Gloucester was, however, to play a vital part in restoring the majesty of the Crown. In July 1471 – only a few weeks after the exhausting ordeal of the Tewkesbury campaign – he was on his way north to deal with a new rash of border incidents on the Scottish Marches. This was no temporary commission. Edward had decided to invest the eighteen-year-old veteran of his two great victories with the spoils – and the responsibilities – of the conquered Earl of Warwick.

In the northern counties and the Scottish Marches a strong tradition of lawlessness and independence defied the efforts of the distant Council at Westminster to impose order and justice. The rugged and backward North had long enjoyed a political complexion different from that of the South. In order to protect the border against Scottish incursions, successive English kings had invested great families, such as the Nevilles and the Percies, with huge estates and semi-regal powers to raise private armies as Wardens of the Marches. For fifteen years, the open warfare between the Nevilles and Percies had promoted local feuds and invited the depredations of the Scots.